Paint Schoodic

Friday, May 29, 2015

Doing well by doing good

Asticou Azalea Garden,
designed with the financial support of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in the late
1950s.

Earlier this month, financier David Rockefeller announced
that he is giving a thousand acres of land on Mount Desert Island to the Mount
Desert Land and Garden Preserve on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

The park at Stourhead,
designed by various landscape architects, 1741-80. English landscaping tremendously impressed our American gilded-age fashionistas.

Mount Desert Land and Garden Preserve is comprised of two
gardens built in the late 1950s. Asticou
Azalea Garden is patterned after a traditional Japanese garden. Thuya Garden and Lodge
is a semi-formal herbaceous garden in the English style. The donated land abuts the Thuya Garden property and includes carriage roads, hiking trails, fields, woodland and streams.

Duck Brook Bridge in Acadia National Park

In 1910, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. built a hundred-room cottage
in Seal Harbor called The Eyrie. Acadia was a gift to the American people, but
it also effectively sequestered Seal Harbor from the hoi polloi who holidayed on the Maine coast.

The Eyrie was torn down in the early 1960s.

Rockefeller and his neighbors were concerned about ‘overdevelopment,’
by which they meant the possibility of neighbors like you and me. They
created an association, donated 5,000 acres to it and gave it to the Federal government.
Rockefeller bought more land and donated it; this formed the nucleus of
what is now Acadia National Park.

A car venturing on the Acadia carriage road, 1920s.

With its carriage roads, Acadia was
very much a combination of English park and public accommodation. So it is
fitting that it would also have its formal gardens in the English style (Anglo-Asian
gardens being an English garden theme), and fitting that they would end up being public spaces.

I’ve always found it
kind of charming to imagine American robber barons aping their British cousins
in the creation of their Stately Homes, their vast Parks, and their Gertrude
Jekyll-inspired gardens. Many of those British homes have been transferred
to the National Trust; many of their American equivalents have become museums
and parks. It almost gives you faith in the democratizing tendencies of
Father Time.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula
in beautiful Acadia National Park in August 2015. Click here for more information on my Maine
workshops! Download a brochure here.